Not an Orca

Somehow I managed to play a reasonable amount of EVE last week. We even saw the occasional person to shoot at! On Thursday we were hunting when I spotted an Orca somewhere in system. Oh hell yeah! I'll kill some Orca. The Orca started hauling stuff between a Citadel and an Engineering Complex so we got ourselves set up with a stop bubble. Our first and very visible attempt to catch the Orca failed terribly so we came up with an alternative - catch whatever the hell came to shoot at us. The following video shows how that went. I'm the voice who eventually becomes FC and calls the Stratios primary.

Enjoy that? Think you can do better? We are always recruiting ;-)

The final score looked like this. Note that I'm missing because I mainly acted as a diversion and neither died nor was killed.

Gratitude

:sadface:

Local Chatter

paranoik vutra > hello
paranoik vutra > I'm gay

If it hadn't been for the flippant comments we'd never have known one of our wormhole connections was being rolled. I had just finished watching Deutchland 83 (watch it, it's very good) and was considering an early night. However, there is always just one thing to check in New Eden before I hit the sheets. As soon as I logged in I'm told about the chatter in local, told there's a crew rolling a hole, and told about the Vindicator, piloted by the chatty pilot, sitting on the hole being rolled.

We scramble into action. What do we need to kill a Vindy? Battleships of course. How do we stop him from just jumping away through the hole he's rolling? A command destroyer jump field! We get ourselves shipped up and wait for the next transit of the rest of the hole rollers. A Raven jumps in, crawls excruciatingly slowly back to the hole and jumps out. This is our trigger. Rhianna warps his command destroyer in on the Vindicator, activates the jump field then yells at us to warp to him as soon as the 100 km jump takes effect.

Rhianna's command destroyer dies before our Battleships get halfway through the warp. The power of dual webs on the Vindicator prove too much for his oversized prop-mod to cope with. Epic has inexplicably jumped into a Thorax so he arrives next and also dies rapidly. This is enough distraction for the Vindicator pilot and my Hyperion lands along with Ponder's Rattlesnake. We get points on the Vindy and start pouring on the damage.

My Hyperion is feeling the pain. The Vindy hits really hard and readily overwhelms my two armour reppers. I'm overheating everything, the Vindicator is in half armour, I am in a much worse state and explode all the same. Just as I warp my pod off we land another Hyperion on the Vindicator. By this time the enemy has drawn in support and they now also have a Tengu and Gila on field with us. I reship to provide some logi support to our own remaining ships. Before I get there the combined weight of the three hostile ships ends Ponder's Rattlesnake. It's too late for the Vindicator pilot though and he dies 10 seconds later. I cheer loudly, much to my wife's disgust who comes down the stairs to glare at me and close the door more firmly. The fight isn't over yet though.

Vindicator - Rixx Javix

The hostile fleet now comprises of a Gila, Tengu, Falcon, Bhalgorn, and a new Vindicator. We still have a Hyperion and Prophecy on the field with my Oneiros trying to keep out of range of any hostiles whilst also trying to keep my friends alive. I get some reps on the Hyperion before the Falcon jams me. Being jammed proves useful as it lets me focus on something other than trying to rep the friendly ships. I notice the Tengu getting mighty close to me. He points me as I align away from him and put my prop mod on. I watch hopefully as my speed climbs to match and then exceed his. I kite the Tengu 30 km or more from the fight before he gives up the chase. During this time we get our Hyperion out. That just leaves our Prophecy and my Oneiros. As I look for a way to get close to the Prophecy to send more reps he announces on comms that he isn't pointed any more and warps off. With nobody to keep alive I also take my leave of the battlefield.

And thus the fight ends. We put 'gf' in local and keep eyes on their fleet. They take some time to withdraw as their route home is critical on mass once the Bhalgorn jumps through. We contemplate jumping their second Vindicator away again but the toll it took on us first time was probably enough for one night. The final score on the killboard is two billion killed for one billion lost. It took us four ships and was definitely a fun fight. Damn those Vindicators are tough.

Marked for Death

Can you see it? It's small but perfectly formed. Look closer. Closer still. Found it yet? Yup, that's pretty much what I went through trying to find the killmark on my Svipul. If you're still struggling it's on that large, square, rusty plate around the top middle of the image. It's a single wee red/white plook of a marking (ignore sets of double orange lights).

I'm proud of that kill mark. It's the first kill mark I've gotten where I didn't die right after. This makes it the first one I've actually gotten to see. It is also marking my first solo kill of 2016. Mostly it's marking a very amusing kill. We were bored of our static C3 with very little happening. There were a couple of ships appearing and vanishing on d-scan but we'd given up hope of finding them. The decision was made to roll the hole for something new. We were nearly there when one of the hole rollers announced he was getting shot at by a pair of Stealth Bombers. I warped to the hole in my instalock arty Svipul planning to either jump through and rescue the hole roller or pick off the bombers if they jumped into our home.

I landed as the hole roller announced he'd jumped back home. The Bombers didn't follow as the hole went mass critical on his return jump. We had some debate. Should I jump through? What were the chances of the hole dying? Ah, sod it, YOLO! Through I went. Nothing was on my overview or on d-scan. I held cloak while getting my bearings. Then a Manticore decloaked probably expecting a HIC to be finishing off the critical hole. He got more than he expected. I actually thought that I had died as my camera was perfectly in line with his ship when he exploded. It took a moment to realise I still had modules. Once I did realise, though, I locked the pod and moved the pilot closer to a trade hub in the fastest way I know. Local chat said it all

[ 2016.01.06 23:04:11 ] Mikah Darmazaf > lolz
[ 2016.01.06 23:04:16 ] Oreamnos Amric > :)

I hung around the outside of the hole for a few more minutes waiting to see if any response would be formed. We also knew there was a scout in our home who would likely be wanting to leave and I would have the best chance catching him. It became rapidly clear he wasn't going to jump out so I went home ready to clear the way for a HIC to finish the hole. As I jumped home in my low-mass T3 Destroyer I collapsed the hole myself. Damn that was tight on mass! I was a little shaken by how close that had been. Two transits of a hole by a destroyer was all it took. It's a good job that scout didn't decide to fly home.

Starting YC 118 in Style

Sometimes you just have to kick off the year as you mean to continue. There are lots of corps out there who are dedicated to a single activity, almost to the point of ridiculousness. Industrial corps who ban their members from NPSI roams; Mercenary corps who refuse to let their pilots earn ISK from missions when they are between contracts; PvP corps whose rhetoric demonises running sleeper sites to the point of ridiculousness. These corps punish their members for being seen to enjoy any more than a single, blinkered area of the game. Hypocritically they all privately have their own 'carebear' corps and/or characters which they use to earn ISK - the very activity which is vocally derided as a terrible thing to be doing. In Z3R0 Return Mining Inc. we are also blinkered in on a single activity. In particular we aim to have fun and a laugh on comms regardless of what we find to do in-game or how badly we do it. It may come as a surprise to corps who obey the afore mentioned anti-ISK-earning indoctrinations but it really is possible to do this without being a bad person.

Last night we had one such night. Everything started fairly slowly with me logging on alone. I found our home system was swiss-cheese with K162s and set about scanning everything down. Our C3 static was quiet and had a few teasing Frostline sites. I had been getting bored of those but a few nights ago I got a Vindicator BPC and a 650 Mil ISK officer module of some description (now for sale in Jita). Picking up a billion ISK in a few minutes did wonders for piquing my interest again. Just as I started running the Frostline sites another corpie logged on. Now I had someone on comms to chat with the game was much more fun. We cleared up the Frostline sites without any exciting drops and moved on to exploring the rest of our chains.

Ponder started scouting out the C2 K162 whilst I went to our other static to see what delights that held. I found lots of gas and very little else. Ponder found potental targets flying a Stratios and an Epithal. We decided Ponder's find was much more interesting so I shipped into something invisible and headed to the C2. Sitting just inside our hole home I awaited Ponder's intel as to which POCO the Epithal would invariably warp to. Sadly when he did warp it was in line with two different planets so I had to take a guess and go to the more likely Barren planet. I chose badly and nobody ever landed. We still had eyes on the Stratios so we stuck around for a while longer. He showed no signs of moving and we gave up hunting in favour of ninja-sucking some lucrative C5 gas.

By now we had ex-corpmate Epigene on comms chatting and then a wild Studley entered from the north to join us stealing gas from the C5. The details of 'stealing gas' is fairly simple. From warping in to a gas site you have 15-20 minutes before the sleepers spawn. In that time you get as many pilots as possible to suck as much gas a possible as quickly as possible. At this point we had five pilots in Ventures in the gas site plus a sixth providing boosts to speed up the rate of gas extraction. As is the common case in w-space this was three people with two characters each. By the end of the first gas site we had earned around 50 million ISK each and had a brief intermission in sucking to scout another corpmate back home from hisec.

Back in the C5 we were almost at the end of our time for the second gas site when our boosting Gnosis was pointed and tackled orbiting the hole home. We cut our sucking short and headed back to reship into something more combat capable than a mining frigate. Thankfully the Gnosis got away but we lost sight of the offending Stratios. A little scanning later and we found a new K162 leading into our home. Of course we went in to investigate and in addition to the Stratios I saw a Prophecy on d-scan. With the ships we had we felt confident that was a fight we could take. We left an uncloaked Proteus on our side of the hole and kept our other couple of ships out of sight. Our opponents moved their Prophecy up to just inside their hole and their Stratios engaged our Proteus. At this point the rest of us decloaked and warped in to fight. This was our first mistake as the Stratios immediately jumped through and both it and the Prophecy ran away. Bugger! Really we should have gotten him to jump through before decloaking the rest of our fleet so we could have something tackled on the other side and unable to run.

A little bit of baiting from us and sniping from them followed but it was clear they wouldn't engage us in a brawl. I decided we should try and provoke some action with combat hole rollers. At this point we realised the second mistake we made of hanging around for too long. Unfortunately the baiting would appear to have given them time to get friends in who landed on their hole at the same time as Studley and I started rolling it. We had their Astarte into half armour when their logi landed. They also had jams from a Falcon, neuts from a Curse plus a load more DPS from a Hurricane, Vigilant and Deimos. It was clear we were toast and even after that I seem to recall they had more ships landing after I got my pod off the field. Good fights were exchanged in local and we decided to call it a night as it was nearly 1 am locally for most of us.

As far as the night went we had scanning, shooting red crosses, gas sucking, being hunted, doing the hunting ourselves, and finally getting whelped by a superior force. It's pretty hard to get a wider range of activities crammed into a single evening in New Eden. Your blinkered mono-activity corps might be better at the single thing they do in this game we love but I like to think in my corp we get to play a lot more of the game than they do and have a lot more fun in doing so. Welcome to YC 118.

Geo 'Arrr' Vent

I had to go a long way back in the archives to find the last time I spoke about Geo on this blog. I couldn't even begin to remember what I've done in the 19 months since that last post. For certain I left Brave Newbies when they went to nullsec. Other than that the only thing I know for sure is painted in this screenshot.

If you recall, dear reader, Geo was created as my PvP character. I was too adverse to lose ships with Oreamnos so needed another character whose killboard I didn't mind destroying. The idea was worthwhile and I lost all the pointless fear of adding ships in red to Oreamnos' killboard. But where does this leave poor Geo? In short, he became my diversion from wormhole life. He was my go to character for mindless violence.

In The Bastards I met a decent bunch of people, some experts in game mechanics others less experienced in EVE but eager to blow stuff up. With them I've invaded wormholes, defended a sacrificial titan, and captured (and lost then recaptured) small parts of nullsec. Enough fun has been had to leak into the wormhole side of life and joint ops between The Bastards and Illusion of Solitude occur from time to time.

Just like as an individual player of EVE it's nice to have friends, as an alliance it's nice to have other alliances to call on as friends. The Bastards are our only contact with full blue standings and IoS call them friends.

Moving On

I've been struggling to find time to enjoy EVE recently. I still hang out with my alliance in our Jabber server and I've still been making the regular fleet night I run each week. Beyond that I just haven't been motivated to log in much. This obviously carries over to the posts I make here which have dwindled down to less than one a week. Obviously with less time to play EVE there is less stuff to write about. If you add to that the little I do play is trying to recoup the two billion ISK I've lost in the past six weeks then I really do have little to blog about just now. Site running doesn't make for interesting reading.

In my alliance I always maintain that real life is more important than EVE (usually stated as "RL>EVE"). This is true and is the underlying problem for my EVE malaise. In 'RL:Work Edition' I am really busy pulling a new and rather large project under the wings of my department. In 'RL:Home Edition' I am in the process of buying a new house. I seem to be drowning under a tidal wave of paperwork with each new day bring something new to sign and send money away for. Some times I can't help but wonder if the whole thing is a long Jita scam, possibly a bonus room type of thing where they'll keep sending me more and more things to sign until I finally crack.

Not relevant to this blog post

But wait, did I say I'd lost about two billion ISK in six weeks? How did I manage that? The biggest single loss was my alt's Orca. This was lost due to drunken impatience after a hole-rolling incident which saw me stuck in a busy Molden Heath system. Instead of being patient I tried to flee to a quieter nullsec system to scan myself from. That was a mistake as the locals had the wormhole bookmarked, followed me through and popped me. Just over two weeks later, whilst running sites to recoup the cost of buying a new Orca I was caught by pilots from ArB Llc. This particularly stung as they used to be in my alliance. I'm sure they got a buzz out of killing my Gila but my wallet didn't. The final loss in this litany is also the first PvP fit ship to die. One of my corp mates had a Vexor sitting at the sun as obvious bait. Our plan was to get in, kill it, and flee before their cavalry landed. We managed parts one and two easily enough but the cavalry landed and killed my Proteus before I could leave. Swapping a Proteus for a Vexor seems fair enough to me. Did I mention I'm crap at Chess?

All is not lost, however. At least some of the RL woes are coming to an end. Pretty soon I'll be in a shiny new house (if the developer gets their finger our and stops sliding the date back). This should give back a lot of my evening time as well as take all the related things I need to remember out of my head. In the meantime I've taken some alts on a deployment to nullsec for some fun. Of course, I couldn't possibly say what that is as nullsec is all about the Opsex. Well, something like that anyway....

An Evening of Agony

Agony Unleashed have been running monthly public roams for some time now. I had not managed to make it on of these roams so when an evemail arrived last weekend announcing the February roam I started making plans. First of all I forwarded on the mail to my entire alliance to try and draw more of us from our wormholes; the best experiences you have in EVE are the ones you can share with friends and talk about later. I attracted two more Zeroites to come on the roam with me - Kennesaw and Epigene. The three of us made our way to Stacmon with our destroyers of choice: a Thrasher for Kennesaw; a Catalyst for Epigene; and a Serpentis Catalyst for myself. I also had three spares available for the inevitable loss of ships I expected to occur.

Getting everyone into the fleet was quick and efficient and before long we had a fleet of around 55 pilots ready to head out. We were introduced to our FC for the night, Itkovian Beddict, and we set off for Dastryns to pick up our fleet mates afflicted with low sec-status. With our first jump into lowsec time was taken to remind everyone how to follow orders - anchoring on the FC, burning to get in position, and aligning ready for warping as a single unit. It was while practicing these maneuvers that the FC uttered the quote of the night - "Is... is that a Drake?!". It really was a Drake but I'm fairly certain it was a troll-Drake as the pilot didn't take much persuading to reship to a Destroyer lest he be left behind to die.

With the amusement and practice out of the way we set route for Vestouve and were on our way. Very quickly we ran into a Suddenly Spaceships Battlecruiser gang in Aunsou. To my shock, delight and amazement we engaged and killed 10 of their ships, including two T1 logi. We then killed another pair of Ishtars from another corp who wandered a little to close to us. The battle report is more than a little confused. With much excitement and rejoicing over what just happened we headed back to Stacmon so those who lost their ships could get new ones. Only half an hour into the roam and we had killed over a billion ISK with our Destroyer fleet. Superb!

After everyone had reshipped we set back out on the same path towards Vestouve. This time we made it all the way there before one of the scouts called in tackle on a Nightmare. Could we really take that with our fleet? Turns out we probably could have but that Nightmare burned away from us at almost 2000 m/s. That speed was just with an afterburner fit! I had no idea they could go that fast. Once he burned out of tackle range he warped off to a station and an Archon undocked in place of the Nightmare. Attempting to kill that would be pointless so we moved on and into nullsec.

We didn't have to go far to get properly engaged for fight number two. This time we found a cruiser gang and buoyed with the knowledge of how the Battlecruisers faired against us I knew how this was probably going to go. We engaged and took out a further five ships including a taste 600 Mil Orthus. It was at this point I realised my 1600 rounds of Spike ammo were dangerously low. I had never expected to live this long so didn't want to load too much ammo destined to simply appear on a killmail. Sadly we didn't encounter anybody else willing to take us on for a fight and I managed to restock my ammo on a brief cross-hisec jump we made. It turned out I needn't have worried as our final prowl around lowsec yielded us no targets willing to engage us.

My many thanks go out to Agony Unleashed for organising these regular NPSI roams. Also thanks to Itkovian Beddict for being a great FC. Thanks to the people scouting for him too, they were awesome. If you are interested in dipping your toes deeper into PvP (and you really should) you would do a lot worse than joining the in-game mailing list 'AGONY PVP UNI' and watching for an email announcing the next one. Rumour was it should be in the middle of March.

Sore Winners

I logged in on Friday night to the wonderful words - "site running Domi in the new 3a1". Who could possibly turn down an opportunity like that? The few of us who were on scrambled for something appropriate but before we could get ourselves sorted the Domi cleared the site, warped back to his POS, and got into a scanning boat. Our target was evidentally paying enough attention to notice the new sig we created in his system. We figured the game was up and shipped down to something more appropriate for killing a scanning frigate. If we couldn't kill his Domi the least we could do was kill him, send him to k-space, then run his sites. Time passed and we discussed exactly how many of the sigs he hadn't scanned before starting his PvE session. More time passed and we started to think the chap had maybe died at his keyboard. Eventually he appeared uncloaked at range from the hole to our home. I speculated that the uncloakedness was a ploy to bait people into prematurely attacking him before he jumped into our hole to check it out. What happened next was surprising.

After he, presumably, bookmarked our wormhole connection he didn't jump though to see who had opened it. Instead he went back to his POS, got in his Domi and started running another site. Caught slightly off-guard we fled back to our POS to reship once more and formed up ready to take the second bite at this giant flying space-potato. First on grid was our Eris to gain initial tackle with a bubble. The Eris didn't make it away and when our Onyx landed the Domi pilot decided to make the most of his situation by also podding the Eris pilot. With that out of his system the Domi died and we spent so long enough discussing if we should ransom the pilot that he self destructed his pod.

With the initial excitement over we settled down to scan the constellation and get our podded pilot and one other corpie back home. This went fairly straight forward and as our pilots headed towards the entrance I hung out in our 3a1 looking for signs of life from any of our victim's friends (likely alts in a five man corp). At the same time I also piloted my hauler to the entrance system with a selection of PvP ships to replace my terribly dwindling supply. Everything was quiet in our constellation until someone noticed scanning probes in our home hole. I warped back just in time to join in the fight against a random tengu which had appeared from out of nowhere. He teased us for a while with his massive shield tank - repeatedly boosting from 50% back up to 100% shield - before jumping out of our hole and warping away. I shipped back to my cloaky Proteus as it was the highest dps ships I had at the time and we awaited his return.

As we waited we took time to find out where he came from. Oh yeah, a new sig in our home system. Almost certainly this Tengu was over-tanked and baiting us in for all his friends to turn up. Sure enough the Tengu waited out his polarisation timer and jumped back into us. We had a scout jump into their hole to see exactly what was awaiting us. Our scout reporting "There's a whole shit load of ships in here waiting to jump in" confirmed our suspicions. Never not take bait is a phrase I picked up from another blogger and it definitely applied now. We went in; we took bait; bait jumped back to the 3a1; we followed knowing bait's friends would now block the route home; we still couldn't break bait's tank. Damnit...

With 8% of my armour left I had to bow out from the fight and take my chances warping back to a POS. Miraculously I managed to get away and so did everyone else. We lost the fight hands down but didn't lose a single ship we had on field. And so the butt-hurt crap began in local:

Admiral Synergy > fucking pussies
Evan Roc > pussies
Admiral Synergy > might as well just self destruct your ships
Evan Roc > lame kid , lame
Admiral Synergy > All you illusion of solitude guys are the same
Admiral Synergy > Run for the POS as soon as there's more than 1 ship on grid
Admiral Synergy > 7 t3's vs 1 tengu..... Yeah, you sure had me......
Oreamnos Amric > dude, seriously? You just outnumbered us and kicked our arses.
Admiral Synergy > You have minimum 8 pilots and this is your home wormhole.
Admiral Synergy > We have 7 in fleet......
Admiral Synergy > You really suck at shit talking.
Admiral Synergy > So, you going to fight or not?
Oreamnos Amric > you suck at wining a fight
Admiral Synergy > You outnumbered us and this is your home wormhole so you can reship... AND YOU RAN.
Oreamnos Amric > you let us go
Oreamnos Amric > you fought us, we lost. you didn't hold points.

From my point of view it was an evenly matched fight in numbers but they had a massive advantage in fleet composition. There was a Tengu and Loki we were fighting in 3a1 but they also had a whole load of neuts and ewar awaiting inside our hole. We were all ragtag as we usually are. To say I was surprised to get away when I jumped home is to understate my emotions somewhat. I was totally stumped when I found out we suffered no losses at all. I'll never understand how that is even possible. Given their numbers and our numbers we should have lost at least one ship. So my thanks go to Admiral Synergy and his friends at Awakened Ones. We like to fight even if we're not that great at it. We tend to take fights as long as there's a vague possibility we might win. There's no dishonour in leaving a fight you already lost. We should have lost several of our ships in that fight but you were wonderful and let us disengage with ease. Next time though, win with a bit more grace. It's more becoming of you.

Gud Fites

After an annoyingly long Monday and subsequently busy Tuesday I logged into EVE with a mood for some violence. My corp was scanning down our chain and thinking what to do with the evening when a Magnate jumped into our C3 static from a hisec connection. No kill is too small in wormhole space and we quickly found him setting up shop in a hacking site. I quickly got over there in my Astero and found him rapidly burning away from the cans. I set off in cloaked pursuit and was a little over 100 km away from him when he predictably warped down to start hacking the cans. I kept burning to where he had been, betting on the odds that he would warp back there after hacking a couple of cans. I was covering around 350 metres per second meaning I needed to keep on course for five minutes. In the meantime one of my corpmates was getting into position with an Arazu when he accidentally decloaked on a structure. Everyone's hand was forced and Ponder tried to point the Magnate. Of course, he was warp stabbed and warped off in the direction of a sleeper site, landing almost directly on top of the sleepers. This caused him to panic and warp around a bit before finally coming back to the 'safe' bookmark I was trying to position myself at. Fortune favoured me and I found him under nine kilometres away at which point another corp mate warped their Sabre to me and it was game over for the Magnate and pod (even with warp core stabs fitted, take that Rixx!).

It was at this point we realised the pilot was only three days old. There was some discussion as to whether or not he was someone's alt. He flew well enough doing all the right things with safes and bookmarks so we didn't believe he could truly be new. However the civilian fitting on the ship suggested he was. Somewhat confused I convo'd him for some clarification. After chatting for a few minutes I believed that he was new and was doing a good job learning quickly. I tossed him some ISK to cover the cost of his ship and pointed him in the direction of EVE University. Keeping people around who actually want to learn how to play EVE is good for the game. Some of my corp mates still think he is an alt and I just wasted ISK, but I'm willing to gamble 15 million ISK on being wrong vs. keeping someone new in the game maybe just that bit longer so they can find the same enjoyment I have of EVE.

Anyway, the night continued and we got another contact from an incoming C4 to our home hole. Ponder having reshipped from an Arazu to a Sabre jumps after the Buzzard, bubbles up and kills both it and the pod before any of the rest of us manage to show up to help. This pilot's been around for three years so gets no special favours but what comes next surprises us. A convo goes to Ponder from a corpmate of the victim asking how many we have online for an organised fight. Ponder says there is just the three of us and they pass for now. Having said that a Gila starts hanging around our C5 connection. Just sitting there looking tasty. We know there's probably a huge fleet sitting behind the hole it came from but a Gila is a Gila and we want to shoot it. A couple more people roll online and are getting sorted when we decide this is too tasty a target to pass up. What's the worst that can happen anyway? Four of us warp to the Gila and start shooting. The Gila's friends jump in. Our fight is Brutix, Drake, Harpy and Sabre vs. Gila, Devoter, Navy Vexor, Sacrilege, Falcon. The Falcon is a pain so we take one of our own onto the field too. I was FC and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't surprised as we took out the Gila, Sacrilege, Falcon and Devoter. Even if we did swap most of our ships to do so. Our 'gf's in local were not reciprocated and we felt a little annoyed that they podded Epicurus.

We had a scout jump in to see what else they had awaiting to jump us with. The scout reported "a whole shitload of ships here" including various T3s. They amassed a fleet we couldn't fight and were considering our options when more people logged in. Numbers looked better and we had a bunch of corp ships which needed dusting off. An agreement was made to fight at the sun with no podding. Again I was FC and with a "fuck it, let's go" I warped the fleet to the sun. We landed 50 km from the opposing fleet and we just sat there for a bit. Should we burn to them? Wait for them to burn to us? Warp off and back to a better position? I get us to align away when they come to us. Okay folks, primary is the Drake. After shooting the Drake for a while someone points out it clearly has a brick tank so we switch to a Brutix. They are much squishier and it almost goes down before I die for the first time. Warping off to reship someone else starts calling targets and I derp around going to the wrong POS and missing not one but two Brutix kills. That is the last kill we get and after most of us dying two or three times we end the fight. Our ships are dusted off and exploded. To the victors go the spoils.

Actually, scratch that. Let's share the spoils! Some of my guys warp in to start looting and salvaging while both parties chat in local about what an awesome fight we'd just had. It's getting silly when one of my guys warps in an Orca. I reship to whore on the Orca lossmail if our new frenemies decide to shoot it (I wouldn't have blamed them if they had). They're good sports though and everything ends nice and friendly. It really was a great fight. I was told I did okay at FCing it. I'm not so sure as I never know what the hell to shoot first. I was happy that I at least picked ships to shoot and told people so we could cohesively all shoot at the same thing. I really need to read some FC 101 manual or something. Many thanks again to the guys in 'POS Party'. You killed way more ships than we did, we killed the same amount of ISK, everyone had fun - this is how you win at EVE.

Gladiators, start your engines!

For the first expansion since Apocrypha, in Rhea new wormhole systems are being added to New Eden's universe. It will not be possible to anchor POSs in any of these systems due to the lack of any moons. The lack of moons is being explained by every single planet being Shattered, leading to the classification of this new type of space as 'S-space'. As well as the lack of moons to anchor POSs at these new systems have several other features to distinguish them from the W-space I am so familiar with:

• Landmark sites
• High frequency of wormholes
• Extra-rich asteroid belts
• Ice mining

In addition to this list there will be no possibility of getting capital ships into S-space, either by flying, jumping or construction. It seems CCP are really pushing back to basics with this new space. I've read at least one comment suggestion CCP are creating new space to remove features (read: cap and supercap ships) they would like gone from K-space but could never risk the player outrage to do so.

Out of the 101 systems there is one extra-special new solar system called Thera. In addition to the above features Thera will also have four dockable stations. These stations have the normal facilities of industry, repair, medical and a market. Currently you can even install a jump clone in one if you want. The two things which distinguish this system from any other K-space system is the lack of jump gates and its massive size.

As mentioned Thera has a market to buy your ships, there are medical facilities so if you get podded you don't have to find your way back in, this is technically nullsec so there are no security status penalties for engaging in combat. In addition to the above Rhea also brings the removal of clone costs to protect your skill points after being podded. The sum of the above is CCP are essentially introducing a combat arena to New Eden. In true CCP style this is not an honourable arena where 1v1 battles are forced to be honoured, rather this is more like a free for all with no end.

- Want to fleet up to kill that Machariel?
- Sure, but can I shoot you after it dies?
- Okay!

There are already cries that the large nullsec alliances will just move in, assert control and ruin it for everyone. Those same arguments appear for almost every new feature CCP release. Yes, it is a possibility but rather than assume this potentially wonderful new feature will be a flop how about supporting what it could be. Go out and help to realise the potential of Thera as a bloody battlefield of epic proportions. Install a jump clone and when you want some casual, consentual, unprotected pewpew head over to Thera to die gloriously.

Enjoy the Outback: Station camping on Sisi

Bob giveth

Since Hyperion came out there has been so much more scanning to do in wormhole space. Sadly this additional scanning doesn't seem to come with additional combat to make it worthwhile. Either we find nobody, someone hiding in their POS force field, or a force who simply dunk us into the ground. The latter of those options is still more fun than either of the others but I'd rather be the one doing the killing.

On Tuesday evening I was sitting in front of the computer eating dinner when my corpmate, Rhianna, sent a message out on Jabber - "Orca outside POS forcefield in 5a1". A screenshot followed showing the ship sitting just outside the forcefield - a fairly safe position for something with a likely high EHP. A quick discussion and we decided to set up a bombing run to at least wake up the Orca pilot if not actually kill him. Bomb perches were set up as I logged in Orea and another toon. Once I was shipped into a pair of Manticores I jumped through to get into position.

I was barely clear of the wormhole when a pair of Armageddons landed on the connection back home. They jumped through and back, obviously looking to roll the wormhole. We decided trying to kill a 'geddon on the wormhole was a much more exciting prospect than just a wakeup call to the Orca pilot. I manoeuvred my two bombers into position whilst Rhianna got back to the POS to watch what happened there. What happened was the two pilots logged off. Boo. Clearly I didn't cloak fast enough as they landed on the wormhole and they got scared off. With that it was time to log off myself and go help my wife with the kids lest I risk non-consensual 'pvp' IRL!

Several hours later we decided to go help out our logged-off Russian neighbours by clearing their expensive gas site. Since we gained our new C5 static we've discovered a couple of the gas sites are actually worth running. In fact the ISK earned is comparable to running C4 combat anomalies yet the risk after clearing the initial sleepers is only a handful of Ventures. We get to about 85% of the gas cleared when the locals start logging back on. Their POS is off d-scan from us but a Revelation somewhere isn't. Not unduly concerned about the Rev (we're in Ventures after all) we continue to suck gas whilst a scout gets eyes on the POS and then probes down the Rev.

Someone call the Red Cross?

"Second Rev at POS plus the Orca is back. Other Rev is running sites!" is exclaimed across comms. Really? This guy is running sites and knows we are here. Another voice pipes up "hole home is critical". Ah bollocks, that's why he's unconcerned. We can't kill either Rev, or the Archon which just appeared from nowhere, but we can finish the plan to wake the Orca pilot from his boosting trance. As we leave to drop the gas off and reship their scout, glupishkin, does the unthinkable and breaks silence in local to say "bye bye". His thoughts must have changed as three of us head back in Manticores for some mischief. As we warp to the earlier bombing perch made for surprising the Orca all the cap pilots warp back to their POS.

"The Orca pilot has logged off". I'm aligned towards the Orca and closing distance as this message comes over comms. I start counting in my head ready to launch the bombs at the last moment I know I can still hit the Orca before his emergency warp kicks in. Our three Manticores loose their bombs and warp off. Only one of us gets a PvP timer. I'm feeling disappointed at this when Rhianna says "won't he have a timer too?". Oh hell yes! And he logged off already so doesn't know! We have 15 minutes to scan down his Orca which is no longer under the safety of the POS guns. Now we can really kill it.

Image courtesy of The Wormhole Diaries

It feels like forever while the Orca is scanned down, but scanned down it is. We all warp to it and the earlier unthinkable but now inevitable explosion happens. The pod immediately warps off under emergency warp mechanics but a quick scan locates that too. We loot what we can, shoot the rest, then head home deeply satisfied with Bob's gift of Orca and pod.

Insurance Crooks

In real life I'm not much of a gambling man. For me this translates to generally not buying insurance of any sort unless it is either a legal requirement or the impact of not having it would be horrific. I have insurance for my motorbike as I legally have to. I have contents insurance for my house as that's a lot of money if I need to refit my entire house. I don't ever take out the stupid extended warranty insurance on electrical goods because stuff generally lasts long enough to replace if it dies usually negating the cost of insurance in the first place.

On the one occasion I had to deal with an insurance company I found it a horrifically stressful situation. I'd written off a motorbike after only owning it one week (yes, I rode it like an idiot and deserved to crash). I had cracked ribs and a broken thumb, which isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things, but the most painful part was trying to have the insurance company pay out. They were adamant that the second hand bike I owned one week had lost 50% of its value. What they were offering was some twisted version of 'fair market price' yet there was no replacement for my bike at that price anywhere on the second hand market. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing they eventually paid me something and I ended up a third of the value out of pocket. This strengthened my distrust of insurance companies.

Conversely, and somewhat ironically, I've found insurance companies in New Eden to be particularly amiable. Not only will they pay you exactly the value of the policy you took out on your ship, even though you wilfully took the ship into harms way, they will even pay 40% insurance if you forget to insure the ship. I always thought real life insurance companies could learn something from New Eden insurance. Always, that is, until I lost my Gnosis in lowsec the other day.

Killmail Insurance Estimate

Actual Payout

The top image shows the estimated payout from the killmail generated when my Gnosis was lost. As you can see it's a fairly reasonable 10 Million ISK, considering I didn't insure it. The bottom image shows the notification text for the actual payout. A whole 2 ISK! I'll try not to spend all that at once, thanks very much.

Seems my dream of real life insurance companies learning from New Eden may be going the wrong way and the crooked tendencies of real life are merging into New Eden instead.

A Kill For Breakfast

The background to this post

Being slightly crazy, I am up at 07:00 to watch the Chinese Formula One Grand Prix. Being awake means my computer is switched on and I'm logged into the alliance jabber server. It isn't long (25 minutes and 10 seconds to be exact) before someone notices I'm there and asks me to take care of some administrivia. For once this particular administrivia requires logging into the EVE client which is probably not a good thing half an hour before the lights go off and the race starts. Tiny bit of work done for my alliance buddy so I settle down to watch the Grand Prix. Being at my computer I decide to continue the admin trend by going through my old emails and filing them appropriately, mostly in 'Trash'. I finish clearing out several pages of old mails then decide to clear out our old intel and start scanning. There is only one new sig to scan down - our static.

I can't just scan down the wormhole without jumping through to take a look at our new neighbour. Class 3 wormholes always have a static in K-space and this one leads to nullsec. Not my idea of an ideal hole to live in and many people must feel the same as C3 holes with a static null are often empty. With this in mind it doesn't surprise me that there are no online POSs showing on d-scan. With three planets over 14 AU away I warp to each of those in turn to make sure nobody lives here. On the final planet I discover an online POS, but more importantly I see drones, two Dominix and an Armageddon, and (the final tell-tale sign) wrecks on d-scan. Someone is running sites. Almost on cue one of the anoms disappears from my scanner interface to confirm this.

I warp to a safe spot within d-scan range of the remaining two anoms bookmarking both while in warp so I can be sure to find their locations later. I work out which site the ships are now in then sit watching d-scan while the sleeper wreck count creeps up. I count 11 wrecks then warp in to get a bookmark on their Mobile Tractor Unit. I'm slightly surprised to find the battleships still in site with two more sleepers to shoot. Maybe I miscounted, but anyway I bookmark the MTU and beat a hasty retreat before I get decloaked by one of the Sleepers who are worryingly close. I get myself to a nice distance where I can warp down onto the MTU while watching the battleships run the final site on d-scan.

Surprises in EVE are rarely pleasant

It's now a matter of playing the waiting game while watching the post-race interviews. I can see the battleships running the other site without an MTU gathering the wrecks. An age passes while waiting for the battleships to leave the final site and then for their salvager to reappear on d-scan. He isn't in my site though. A narrow d-scan shows him in the other site first. I contemplate warping there but I decide I should just wait here where I'm all set up. This should mean I get more loot in my killmail. At some point between d-scans the Noctis turns into another MTU. Confusingly the Noctis has warped somewhere other than my site leaving me puzzled. I start to worry if he has some plan involving downtime keeping him safe from ganking before deciding that is just silly. Finally d-scan and then the overview show a Noctis exactly where I expect it to be. I warp to the MTU, decloaking while in warp and activating all my modules. I land a mere 4km from the Noctis, point him and give a hefty bump just to make sure he's not going anywhere. He explodes and his pod flees the scene.

I scoop the loot, shoot the wreck, then retreat to my safe spot. Triumphantly I link my killmail in the Alliance channel only to receive a mouthful of sarcastic abuse for ruining the game for the poor innocent site runners. I then link a second killmail for the MTU in the other site and a corpmate pipes up that he's online and would I like a Noctis to come salvage the two dozen wrecks? Well, this sounds like a really dumb idea but given the chance to rub salt into the killmail wounds we do it anyway. Not a hint of any of the residents is seen until we warp back to the hole home with all our ill-gotten gains. There on our wormhole home is a Prorator who appears to have just launched a large warp bubble. He cloaks up and we decide to leave him be. Too late, mate, and thanks for the loot. Funnest 100 million ISK I made for a while.

Drunk Roam

Friday night led to a happy coincidence. A decent number of EU pilots all appeared online at the same time, each with a clear case of being a little drunk. Our constellation was well scanned and nothing interesting was presenting itself anywhere. Nobody appeared online in any of the plethora of holes that had been scanned. Our static had very few sites to run but even if it had nobody particularly wanted to shoot red crosses. Someone, possibly me, asked how lowsec looked. The reply came that it was dead with not a soul in local. Just then another EU pilot logged in, one who knew how to hunt in lowsec. He was appraised of the situation, thought for a moment, and then said "right, it's a crap lowsec but let's go see what we can find".

With everyone in a mix of Brutix, Vexors and the obligatory Drake we were ready to go. Then one pilot arrived in a Mammoth. "Well, that answers the question as to who will be bait". As we made the two short jumps to lowsec our FC read out the rules: "Every time we jump a gate, take a drink. Every time you dock, take a drink Everytime you...". We quickly got the picture and everyone started adding rules. I added a rule of "everytime you add a rule you take a drink". By the time we stopped adding rules I think the only thing you didn't take a drink for was breathing.

Waiting for a fight

Our quiet lowsec was indeed quiet so we headed off in some direction to see what our Mammoth could fish up. It only took two or three jumps before Rhianna in the Mammoth announced ships on a gate. Two of them warped off leaving only a Vigilant there when the Mammoth shed its session change cloak. The Vigilant pilot couldn't pass up the chance of an easy kill on the industrial ship and was probably a little surprised when he was tackled by it. The rest of us quickly jumped through, gained extra tackle, webs, and started shooting. The Vigilant went down rather fast under gate guns, three battlecruisers and my Vexor. It would have died a little faster if I'd remembered about my drones.

Unfortunately the FC didn't get on the kill due to some problem with docking at a station resulting in the people outside the station killing him. Unsurprisingly, we also lost the Mammoth. The two pilots reshipped but the rest of the evening was fairly quiet. We tried to get some locals to engage us at various places in one system. Rather than come fight they undocked an Archon for a bit then put it away again. Really? Obviously they were too scared of losing their ships to come fight us. Well oiled and satisfied with our single kill we went home.

Proud

I normally check the alliance killboard in the morning when I'm having breakfast. Today I was up earlier than normal for the Australian F1 race so my brain was more sleep-addled than normal. When I checked the killboard I was convinced that we had lost some capitals overnight. It took a little while for my brain to realise the capitals were on a green background.

3 Caps + 1 T3 + 1 Pod = 22 Bn ISK

The Moros was worth 6.7 Bil, the Naglfar was worth 6.8 Bil and the Thanatos was 7.2 Bil. The pod was pretty tasty too. I missed getting in on this action by an hour. Admittedly if I hadn't been getting up stupidly early to watch motorsport it would have been more like four hours, but still. Nice kills boys, I'm proud of you.

Update: An after action report has been written by someone actually there. It makes for a good read.

Just a Little Patience

I get home from work on Friday evening to a message on the alliance jabber server from one of my guys. Seems the people living in our static are moving out and, being the good neighbours we are, we decide to help them. Our current scout needs to take a break so I log in with Orea and park myself on the perch we made near their POS. I realise they still have a decent number of modules to offline and unanchor. This could be a long wait.

During the course of the evening I watch a rather disorganised POS pulldown. One of my corpmates comments that we should jetcan a prop-mod for their Iteron V just to speed things up. Eventually our targets realise warping off and back to the next thing they want to unanchor and scoop is faster than slowboating around. By now I'm required elsewhere to watch a film with my wife. Others are watching the POS efforts unfold and I'm floating back and forward between the film and fleet chat to see what's happening. Just as my film ends the locals offline their POS and almost immediately start onlining it again. WTF?! Oh, they left a PHA anchored and need the POS online to unanchor that before they can unanchor the POS properly. Also, we now have a Proteus guarding their hisec connection. Guess what guys, we're already in here plotting to kill you!

Cue even more waiting, watching, and discussing how terrible they are at pulling down their POS. We watch one guy log off followed by a new contact appearing on d-scan in a noobship. Okay, that'll be his alt leaving the hole. Noobship jumps out, new contact logs off, old contact logs back on. Guess we were correct. Now they have one guy leave in a pod and return in a pod 10 minutes later. What was he doing? Why did he leave and return in a pod? Why is he sitting next to that Tayra? Oh, I know, he needs the skill to fly it and in 22 minutes he'll jump into it. Turns out we were spot on with that prediction and he warps out with the now unanchored PHA.

Our initial plan was to hang around until they unanchored the POS then blow up what we could before stealing the POS when it unanchored. Due to the Laurel and Hardy show they exposed us to we modify that slightly. New plan is to warp down as soon as they down the bubble. Hopefully they start unanchoring the POS before they see us, if not tough. We've waited too long and can't be sure they won't online the POS again or do any manner of unpredictable crazy.

By now we've been watching these guys for six hours. We just want to shoot something - anything. A corpmate who has a habit of wandering through traps logs on and receives that as a warning. I have eyes on the tower. Another corpmate is watching the hisec. A third is ready to go from our home system in a Phobos. After the longest time they offline the POS and I shout "go go go". I warp down and land on what is now only a Mammoth and a Buzzard. I kill the Mammoth and the pod flees. Someone calls that the Proteus jumped into hisec. Is he running away? Damnit! I get the Buzzard into structure then stop firing so someone else can get on the killmail. That explodes and I get the pod.

Sadly, the POS isn't unanchoring. Like everything else these guys did tonight they even took too long to click the appropriate buttons. We're considering what to do when our Phobos pilot mentions he has the Proteus in a bubble but is taking damage. Wait, didn't the Proteus jump out? Turned out he jumped out and back in to crit the mass on the hisec hole. Presumably this was part of their unanchoring strategy? Whatever reason he did it for he was now polarised and we warped off in his direction to end another ship. Expecting a fight I also had my industry character jump into a Brutix for some extra dps. As expected, the Proteus' shields melted as I had my indy character warping to our static hole. The armour started to vanish surprisingly fast as I entered warp to join the fight with the second character. I noted the Proteus set his drones on Orea's Loki but this didn't worry me much as his armour was almost gone now. Really? So fast? Just as my second character landed the Proteus exploded. I started shooting the pod but he got to the hole and jumped out with structure damage.

We looted, salvaged and shot the wrecks plus took the corpse back to our 'meat locker' container. During this we noticed they had a character we didn't know about re-online the POS. This meant taking the fuel which dropped in the Mammoth was really important for us just to annoy them. By now it was really late and two of us had to leave. My parting shot to our Phobos pilot was to have more fun with these guys when they went for more POS fuel. It seems he took that to heart and got five more kills. Including two in hisec which required sacrificing a smart-bombing Naga to the powers of Concord.

Writers' Block

As you may have noticed I have been a bit lax in my posting recently. A large part of that was Christmas and New Year preparations and subsequent recovery. Since then I've sat down several times to write something but never really gotten anywhere. It's not that I don't have anything to write about. The problem is I come up with ideas for topics when away from the computer and can't remember them when I'm back at it. I guess I need to buy a little notepad or something to scribble down ideas. Who said paper was dead?

My lack of blogging is in no way mirrored by an equivalent lack of time doing EVE stuff. For the week between Christmas and New Year we had an alliance gathering in the wormhole of a third-party. What started as our C5 brethren trying to elucidate a fight from a nearby C3 escalated quickly to a fully-fledged eviction. I didn't make it to the initial reinforcement of the POS. I did make it in a couple of days later to help explode their tower. I was top damage dealer too which was nice even if doing so was simply pressing F1 then chatting on comms. Nasty meanies we are. It feels a little bad of us but being willing to fight is part of living in wormholes. It's one thing to not be able to stand up a fleet at any given time but the ships these guys evacuated showed they could have fought back if they wanted.

Just into the New Year and we were welcoming a new group of people into the wormhole. I was just about to log off when my long suffering corpmate, Epigene, announced on comms he had a couple of Ventures on d-scan. I said we had no chance of catching them but was still talked into combat scanning them down while Epi went back for an Onyx to bubble them. I've read the correct way to combat scan, using direction and range to pre-place your probes before actually calling them into range and catching the targets in one scan. I've tried this and I suck at it. I went for the more familiar route and treated scanning these Ventures down like I would a wormhole. One scan, two scans, three scans and I had them. Probes in and I waited for the Ventures to vanish spooked. That never happened and with Epi arriving in someone's Onyx and a new recruit in a Cruicifier I warped the three of us to the scanned ship sig. We landed on their heads, Epi bubbled up and we killed both Ventues and both pods. I got all four killmails. Not bad for going to bed.

Since then we also staged our second monthly alliance roam. We headed into Providence, as we had done previously for our December roam. For some unknown reason CVA have us set to kill on sight so we figure we may as well earn that standings for something. In December we had fun with them, driving a Naga fleet off and killing a few other things. This time around we were not so lucky and got squashed between two CVA fleets. But, well, it was a laugh anyway. The second part of the roam saw us trying out something called "Duck Fleet". This is a fleet dreamt up by Fatal Ascension which comprises a bunch of MWD Algos destroyers filled with drones. All the Algos anchor on a fast frigate who leads the way. Another fast frigate gets all the drones assisted to it and goes off to tackle things. The anchor keeps the ball of Destroyers moving rapidly around on the edge of drone range while the tackle frigate leads another ball, of drones, around. The drones deal massive instant damage to most things the tackle gets a point on. Flying this takes practice and we had a laugh getting the hang of it. Mostly it's just the tackle and anchor frigates who need to actually concentrate though. We got a couple of kills even if we did suck slightly at running this type of fleet.

All in all I've been having a decent time in EVE. Unusually for me it has involved a lot of PvP. Thankfully I'm almost only ever the grunt and not in charge of the pew.

Alliance (and friends) December Roam

Our industrial division kindly donated 50 Drakes to the alliance with the insistence that they be whelped on some foolishness. I added a handful of Ospreys I had lying around and we had ourselves a theme roam. For reasons unknown to me CVA have us set as "Kill On Sight" making destination number one obvious - Providence. I took a bunch of screenshots over the course of the roam but one of our Interceptor pilots was filming the whole thing and spliced together the Providence incursion while I slept.



With various people having to head off we went back to hisec for refreshments before discussing where we would go next. Nobody had any bright ideas so instead we started looking for hotspots of activity in the in-game universe map. While that was being trawled we set off in the general direction of Barleguet, home of Brave Newbies Inc. They seem to be a fun bunch always up for a fight so if we were going to dispose of all these surviving Drakes somewhere it would be a certainty that they would help do just that. En route to Barleguet our scouts discovered a hive of activity in Aulbres. It appeared to be a massive frigate fight was happening so all we could do was fly right in and give them something bigger to shoot at. And shoot us they did.

Primary is, um, shoot things...

All in all it was a really fun night. The only problem we had of the evening was the form-up time of just after midnight. This confused a whole load of people who took "Just after Midnight on Sunday" to mean "Sunday night". This meant people were going to be 24 hours late. Oh well, next time we know better. Thanks to the scouts, logi and of course the FC for making this a fun night. I love it when my alliance gets together and does stuff. This is what makes us more than just a gaggle of corps who happen to fly under the same banner without actually knowing each other.

CZ FFA

On Saturday my fellow Scots over at the Crossing Zebras podcast hosted a community free for all in the infamous Asakai system. Given the first I knew about this event was the posts on my alliance forum suggesting ship fittings what else could I do but haul a bunch of ships there and prepare to die lots.

Although the suggested ship fits had been on our forums for ages it was still the night before when I finally bought all the ships, mods and (most of the) drones. I decided I wouldn't stage out of Asakai's single station as it would probably be camped to hell and I at least wanted to be able to fly around looking for fights as well as fleet up with my alliance. I looked around and decided to stage my ships in Rakapas as that was the closest, non-hisec system with cloning facilities. I was reminded by someone how hard it should be to get podded in lowsec and, combined with discovering I couldn't reach from Jita to Rakapas in one jump with my jump freighter, decided to stage out of Okkamon. This would conveniently be on my route back to Asakai from Rakapas should I be unlucky enough to get podded. In the more likely situation where I found myself without ship but pod intact I would only have one jump to reship.

With all the hulls and modules bought in Jita and jumped across to Okkamon I left Geo to the repetitive task of fitting the ships up to be combat ready. Thankfully there is now a 'Fit' button on the in-game loadout browser making this task easier. Please CCP, could you make that group and load the guns too? Oh, adding my tobacco, spirits, wine and janitor automatically would be nice too. Once the ships were all ready it was time for Orea to make his nervous sojourn into K-space. I think I've mentioned before that Orea has a real fear of systems  featuring 'local'. That fear (or possibly, "beer") didn't stop him flying his cloaky, scanny loki right into a lowsec system where lots of people were staging for a fight. It's only lowsec though so it all worked out fine.

Dare to fly a Noctis down there?

The clock rolled around to 19:50 on Saturday. I got myself on comms, logged in and fleeted up. Sending Geo in a Hound to scout Asakai I was in and rolling around the safe spots I had already prepared. Once the rest of the alliance was all shipped up we met up and started nosing around for some trouble. Already there was a massive wreck field at the sun and we kept pouncing down to brawl with some of the other fleets adding to the wreck field. We were doing so well until another of the alliance was coming in from hisec. We headed over to the Ikoskio gate and were landed on by an armour HAC fleet from BALKAN and friends. We died.

BALKAN and friends.

I quickly reshipped and got myself back into Asakai. The others were not so well prepared as me and I spent a while bouncing around safes again. I should have went back for one of the disposable frigates I took to Okkamon but by the time I thought of that it was too late. We had a another good run killing some famous names and having a blast. Fighting had largely switched to a small faction warfare complex. These only let frigates use the acceleration gate but the mass of cruisers at the gate were doing their best to stop that happening. After a good run we lost all our ships again to the combined might of, um, everyone. Having learnt my lesson from last time I decided to blow a couple of the Incursus I took with me. The first one landed at the small plex just in time for me to realise I hadn't reordered the modules into a sensible manner. I activated my cap booster instead of my dual reps and died without firing a shot. Reshipping into another Incursus I reorganised the modules en route. Landing again on the small plex gate I was intending to take on Xander Phoena. He turned out to be 45 km away so I picked the nearest target and at least managed to shoot him before dying and getting podded. I have no idea how I got podded, I never yet saw the pod, just went from ship to session change to white screen to floating corpse...

Not my best angle.

The rest of the crew were reshipped and ready as I swung past Okkamon to pick up another cruiser then onwards to join them. The event was in its dying throes and targets were few and far between. We went from plex to plex and down to the sun looking for looters. It really was all over though and just as we were about to call it quits ourself I spied a lone Hurricane sitting at the medium plex. I had barely called it when I found Orea in a fleet warp to pounce on the poor guy. Of course the 'poor guy' had friends who conveniently landed on us when he was half into armour. Try and we might to take the 'cane down with us his logi-bros got him repped up nicely and our fate was sealed.

The 'Scoreboard'

Looking at the 'scoreboard' we killed more than we lost but we spent more ISK doing it. Who cares? I didn't go to Asakai to win any awards (although I did score points most on my alliance killboard for the event), I went there to have fun and fun is exactly what I had. I kicked the crap out of my security status. I can't remember how long ago it was last below 4. It's still pretty healthy at a heady 2.9 now so I won't have to go ratting in nullsec any time soon. The other thing I got other than having fun was adding a raft of notable names to my short list of kills - Bagehi, Mangala Solaris (twice), Sindel Pellion, House2twist, and of course Xander Phoena who joins the vanishingly rare ranks of people I've had a beer with and also exploded in EVE. My thanks go out to Xander and the others at Crossing Zebras for arranging this and I cannot wait for the next bout of pointless violence.